Web-based British Sign Language Vocabulary Test
The purpose of the British Sign Language Vocabulary Test (BSL-VT; Mann, 2009a) is to assess deaf children’s lexical development BSL. It is based on two observations reported in research on acquisition of spoken languages:
1. there is more than one way to know a word
2. there is a particular order in which words are usually acquired
One of the aims of the BSL-VT is to investigate whether this is also true for sign language acquisition.
The BSL-VT looks at deaf children between the ages of 4-16 years. It consists of four tasks, including two comprehension and two production tasks, each of which measure different levels of test takers’ understanding of lexical meaning.
The first task is a comprehension task: the test taker sees a sign and four pictures and has to match the sign with the corresponding picture. In the second task, the test taker sees a picture and four signs and has to match the picture with the corresponding sign.
Tasks 3 and 4 are production tasks: in the third task, the test taker sees a picture and has to produce the corresponding BSL sign. In the fourth tasks, the test taker sees a BSL sign and is asked to produce another, different sign with a similar meaning. The signs used in all four tasks are the same, thereby allowing a more in-depth measurement of children’s understanding of each individual sign. The test is usually administered in two sessions during which one production and one comprehension task are completed with at least one week between testing sessions to minimize learning effect.
The BSL-VT can be administered on the internet which facilitates test access, -administration, and -scoring. While the two comprehension tasks can be self-administered by the test taker, the two production tasks are scored by the test administrator during the session, using an online scoring sheet. These performance are also videorecorded as a backup during a current study in the Southern region of the UK, which looks at strong BSL signers in order to establish norms. However, one aim of the BSL-VT is to explore the possibility of scoring productive skills in sign language without using a camera in the future. During the ongoing study, test takers complete all 120 items in each task so the order of difficulty can be validated. In a forthcoming, UK-wide study, which looks at children with varying signing skills, only a subset of items (‘critical range’) will be assessed. The goal is to standardize the BSL-VT and make it available for use in schools.
Performance
on the BSL-VT is compared to deaf children’s recent BSL Receptive/Productive
Skills test scores. In addition, participants’ non-verbal IQ skills were
assessed.